[Vivtek]

That's not even close to what he's saying - I thought that was actually a rhetorical weakness, to tell the truth.

What he's saying is that the existence of the cloud and library advances such as MapReduce and APIs mean that the bar is lowered, when writing new software, to an extent it's hard even to comprehend.

Every time I get a module from CPAN I still get a shiver down my spine, remembering trying to do new and interesting things in the 80's and early 90's and every single time ending up trying to build a lathe to build a grinder to grind a chisel to hack out my reinvented wheel.

[pork]

A bit off, but CPAN really hasn't changed all that much. I tried installing a module the other day, something simple like a word stemmer, and got so disgusted that I quit Perl.

[Vivtek]

Try writing it from scratch, whippersnapper. In C.

I guarantee you'll end up having to write a damn string library and garbage collection - and you'll get it wrong.

[pork]

I'm 45.

[Vivtek]

Which explains your dismay at using new stuff. I'm 45, too. Fight it.

My point - which, as a 45-year-old programmer, you should have understood - was that modern languages and library repositories make a whole lot of basic work go away, so that we're working at a higher level than was possible in 1985.

[wingo]

Your last sentence is really lovely. Thanks.